First published in 1951, this important book might be regarded as the first shot fired in the education wars. Albert Lynd is an excellent writer; he's both smart and funny. I could fill many pages with his delightful disdain for the lightweights who took over our public schools. Here are two examples:
"Quackery is almost inevitable in a profession whose practitioners create their own subject matter and are the only judges of their own competence. A parallel situation, equally irrational, would be a legal profession whose members create laws and enforce them by professional right."
"The confusions and inconsistencies of the Education professors are mirrored in the strange and preposterous dialect they employ to communicate with one another and to bamboozle timid school boards."
I want to focus on two big things that I learned from this book. First, I grasped that the Education Establishment was not simply engaged in a war against American culture. The whole thing was also a business hustle. The system was set up so that teachers have to wade through an endless tide of almost identically empty courses, and have to come back year after year to take more courses and earn more credits. In other words, Education professors created a system which guarantees them endless employment. This is a pretty irony: ultimate socialists turn out to be ultimate capitalists.
Second, Lynn's book makes clear that circa 1950 the Education Establishment was surprisingly open about its plans for the public schools. Foreign languages, math, history, science, all the traditional subjects, should be discarded. Henceforth, students would study their own home life, their personal needs, how their town or city operated, what local businesses were doing, etc. This strategy was called "life adjustment" and "felt needs." My point is, this was dumbing-down in your face. These so-called educators were so anti-intellectual and so in love with their Dewey-eyed theories that they didn't realize that the public might resist; and smart guys like Albert Lynd would write insulting books about them.
What happened next? Our elite educators retreated, regrouped, and got much more cunning. They stopped demanding that the old "content areas" be put in the trash. What they did instead (this is my summation) was to start crafting one "innovation" after another that would take them to the same goals they had celebrated back in 1950. They invented Whole Language, Constructivism, Multiculturalism, Bilingual Education, Cooperative Learning, Self Esteem, and many other gimmicks that were presented to the public as panaceas but functioned as intellectual retardants. I hadn't realized how low the official goals were back in 1950. Once you understand that these people were always aiming for zero, it's easier to see through the pretense in all of their subsequent posturings.
People today are surprised when they observe low standards in the public schools. That surprise makes sense only if you assume that the schools are aiming high. What I'm seeing is that the DNA was locked in place back in the 1930s and 1940s and nothing has changed. In 1950 educators aimed low and told everybody. By 1970 they were aiming low but with much slicker packaging. Here's an illustrative subplot. Educators introduced the inane New Math around 1960; the country laughed and this innovation bombed. The educators retreated, regrouped, and came back with Reform Math. In my estimation, this is remarkably similar to New Math in that there is a lot of fancy college-level lingo but kids can't do basic arithmetic. The genius part is that instead of one bad program that the public can figure out, Reform Math consists of almost a dozen bad programs. As fast as a community decides that one should be rejected, the parents then have to spend five years grappling with the next one. That's cunning!
ADDENDUM: When I wrote this review, I hadn't yet discovered "And Madly Teach" by Mortimer Smith. An excellent book; see review. Published in 1949, it is probably "the first shot fired."
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